Kickstarting Over - Good Night Lamp's Kick-Smart Response

Some projects do better on Kickstarter than others - and, although sometimes a great idea can catch fire, there are some factors that help or hinder.

Peripherals for Apple iDevices tend to play well with novelty-hungry and well-heeled iFans. Sequels to classic games by their original creators often get a favorable wind. Open-source games consoles, for reasons that have yet to become clear, go surprisingly gangbusters.

However, success is not guaranteed even for these relative crowd-pleasers, and those casting their bread upon the crowdfunding waters can never be sure what kind of reception they get.

Take the Good Night Lamp. With less than two days to go, it has not yet reached its target on its Kickstarter appeal. In some ways, despite the peerless Internet-of-Things credibility of its creative team (it is led by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of the Really Interesting Group, a former colleague of Massimo Banzi, the creator of the Arduino standard, and what counts as a veteran in a young sector), it is not a technology play in the way that even Supermechanical's Twine - itself aimed at demystifying the technology - was.

The Good Night Lamp is a simple set of lamps - one big, one or more little. Win the big one is turned on, the little ones turn on. When the big one is turned off, its junior partners also turn off. More junior lamps can be added to the network, but that, at heart, is the whole offer. There is nothing to tinker with or customize - it is a simple point of presence, sent over the Internet.

Good Night Lamp's initial design

Traditional tech financing routes were uncertain of what the such a lamp was to be used for - would it be useful, they wondered, as a way of showing when a team leader was contactable? To which the answer is "yes, but there are probably easier ways to show that".

However, when the GNL team took their prototypes to CES and other consumer-oriented markets, the benefit proposition was clarified: this was an attractive and unobtrusive device for continuous partial affection. Asked who they would send the junior lamp to, the majority of respondents named a partner, and others a child. For those in a long-distance relationship, or living apart from their children - growing numbers in 21st century living - the junior lamp's illumination could be an invitation to video chat - or just a reminder that they were being thought of.

Design matters - the Kickstarter video shows a new look

It's one of those concepts that either immediately makes sense to you or does not, in essence - a non-nerdy Nabaztag (the Internet-connected cyber-rabbits) or a platform-independent Availabot (the point-of-presence proof of concept created by Schulze and Webb, the design agency which grew to become BERG, creators of, among other things, the magazine concept demoed by Steve Jobs at the launch of the first iPad).

The Availabot - tied to IM, it was more explicitly a way of signifying availability for conversation

Bouncing back

With 36 hours to go, GNL's Kickstarter campaign needs a huge injection of donors to complete. However, Deschamps-Sonsino sees value even in a shortfall. Hardware is hard - hard to make, and expensive to set up. Even in an age of growing mass customization, producing a device, and in particular a device that needs to look designed, with no rough edges, has unavoidable startup and machining costs. Handily, the GNL team made available a breakdown of their budgeted costs, to explain the relatively large funds being sought.

As such, the Kickstarter would always need to have a high bar, and not reaching it would always be a risk.

Also, the delivery costs do not scale down to the marginal, as they do with software - once one has made Double Fine Adventure, the cost of copying and distributing it again is negligible. And physical objects need physical benefits: Paul Trowe, whose Leisure Suit Larry revival was successfully Kickstarted, is only one of many kickstartees who have told me how they tried to make as many gifts virtual as possible, to limit the ratio of funds that went straight back into the process of rewarding users.

"I love lamp", from the film Anchorman, inspired a set of T-shirts inserted as mid-tier rewards

However, taking the device to CES, and then up to San Francisco (which, it must be said, has an exceptional concentration of the kind of people in Internet relationships or jobs that finish after children's bedtimes) has, according to Deschamps-Sonsino, not only raised awareness, but also brought the project to the attention of investors and distributors - such as curated design catalogs - which would never otherwise have seen it.

Meanwhile, a contingency plan has been put into place: those who back the Kickstarter , if it is not fully funded, will be given the option to invest a similar amount afterwards, with a similar reward (less the 10% fulfilment fee charged by Kickstarter) - with the payment made once the product is ready, and an option to cancel at any time before fulfilment.

This is an interesting proposition - in effect, it is demonstrating that there are interested parties, and funds the creation of a small run of devices, with the potential to build buzz for the product. These individual devices are likely to cost more per unit, primarily in man-hours (economies of production scale will not kick in) - but hours are a relatively flexible commodity for a startup. Meanwhile, if deals come in for larger production and distribution in the meantime (the lamp has received a fair amount of media coverage already, and will be showcased at The Gadget Show expo in April - a sort of British mini-CES based on a TV show) this run can be folded in. In effect, the Kickstarter becomes a promotion for the online store

Good Night Lamp is, in my opinion, in an interesting hinterland. The Internet of Things, as a market sector, has yet to reach the high street, and in particular has yet to reach the sort of people who spend on premium design (that is, who look for objects with more than functional appeal) - the sort of people who buy from Vitra, say. Over time, as "smartness" of some kind becomes expected in all devices, this nerdy/designed distinction will become increasingly vague. Which will be a problem for those trying to sell unsmart applications of smart systems at a premium (jeans that tweet, I am looking at you), but an opportunity for small companies looking to sell products with an aesthetic or emotional appeal augmented by their smartness.

Kickstarter is unlikely to be the device that opens that door - at least, not yet. But it indicates a demand (the majority of backers invested at a level which would get them a lamp, at a cost well over the average Kickstarter donation), and could yet be parlayed into the future development plans of the right kind of product.

I will be keeping an eye on the development of the Good Night Lamp: it has some interesting things to say about device markets, and about funding models. Also, it's pretty.

Disclosures: John Nussey, Good Night Lamps' Head of Product, showed the Good Night Lamp at an event I curated in London - no money changed hands in either direction.

I am currently a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine in the UK, having written for Wired UK since its launch in 2009, and speak regularly on the impact of developing technologies on consumer behaviors at Wired Consulting events and elsewhere.